The Wind From One Door Closing...

Since the negotiations between Amazon and Hachette have made the news with authors chiming in on both sides, the old Chinese curse has become a reality. We do indeed live in interesting times.

We also live in times that are lagging far behind the 21st century and the technological age. The Big-5 publishers, Hachette, included are working with the old publishing model, even though these media conglomerates have gobbled up every major publisher, and have become mega-corporations with tens of billions of dollars in business and profit every year. Though they claim to be preserving the future of publishing so there will always be books, it's rather like a member of the 1% claiming to understand what it is like for the middle and lower classes of people getting by from paycheck to paycheck and wanting enough disposable income to buy the books they want. In short, that dog won't hunt.

In easier to understand words, the 1% does not have a clue.

Make no mistake, Hachette and the other members of the Big-5 belong to the 1%, as Barry Eisler writes in The Guardian. As Eisler states, "[The Big-5] have done all they can to try to keep the prices of books artificially high, which hurts consumers and costs authors money. They have a record of zero innovation. And they've run the industry for decades in a way that has benefited the few while stifling new opportunities for the many."

James Patterson, multi-million dollar author and employer of a cadre of writers to help churn out 13 books a year, has bought some pretty expensive ads to brand Amazon the bad guy. Did I mention Patterson is a Hachette author? No smoking gun there.

Patterson decries the loss of Mom and Pop bookstores when he should, as Eisler put it, "...reconsider their anti-Amazon ideology, which at root is an attempt to stop the evolution of publishing itself. Because indie authors are the mom-and-pop shops of publishing. And the 1 percent's war on Amazon risks turning us into collateral damage."

Despite this war on Amazon and Hachette claiming to the victim of Amazon's bullying (at least as seen by author, John Greene ), a great opportunity is being lost. This is the 21st century and we live in an age of technological marvels with the life span of a mayfly. In order to compete and stay in business, bookstores need to move with the times, do what Amazon has done, and remodel their businesses. It's time to stop relying on returning thousands of books for full refunds, as they have since the Great Depression when publishers needed to keep bookstores open to sell books, and find a new path through the wilderness. One thing bookstores can be certain of is that books are not going away any time soon.

Amazon puts the customer first and that is what has taken Jeff Bezos's business from his parents' garage into a billion dollars international business. Bezos saw the future and he used technology to create a new business model, one that Hachette and the rest of the Big-5 want to dismantle.

Small bookstores should ask what customers need and want and make that happen. One bookstore turned an old mansion into a haven for customers with niches and nooks and comfortable spots to kick back, relax, and read. They made their store a comfortable place to enjoy a book for an hour or three. It's a step in the right direction, but doesn't go far enough.

How about charging stations for cell phones, tablets, eReaders, and laptops? Charge a small fee for the convenience.

Download stations for eBooks would be a good idea. No charge, just a secure line to do business from whatever store the customer chooses. The customer will repay the owners by spending more time in the store and end up buying books. Owners could also get a license to offer eBooks on every platform available for reading eBooks and offer accessories, skins, and trade-ins (or trade-ups) for all devices. Give customers a sample of whatever book they're considering or bundle print and eBook at a good price. The technology is available, so why not move with the times?

There are machines that print books in minutes, so why not buy a few and offer to print a customer's book in the store? The Espresso Book Machine would be perfect for that, and there are machines from other companies so you can shop price and availability.

Why not have a repair shop for laptops, tablets, and eReaders? Carry the parts and make repairs while the customers waits -- and reads. Another option would be to offer a loaner while their machine is being repaired. Think outside the box.

Host author evenings and round tables. Be THE place to go to discuss books and genres with published authors, beginning with local authors. Be a favored spot on a book tour. Offer classes in writing and editing for hopefuls and provide a comfortable setting for meetings. Start a book club or host other book clubs at the store. The possibilities are endless.

Instead of hanging signs predicting the Death of Books or the End of Books, strike out into the future with a new plan and forge a future in the ever changing print and digital world. The end is not near unless you have no vision and want to, like Hachette, blame Amazon for all your troubles. Closing one door doesn't mean being stuck in limbo or dying a slow and painful death. Another door will open, but one has to have the vision and guts to make a new door.

Let the world choose sides while Hachette and the rest of the Big-5 pretend to be victims of Amazon's innovation and forward thinking, but make a future that is all yours. It sounds like such a great idea, I may find some like-minded people and buy a bookstore going out of business to start my own. The future is here now. Be a part of it, change with the times, but don't complain if you get run over standing goggle-eyed while the train hits you. You've no one to blame but yourself.

Defining Bully

As negotiations between Hachette and Amazon heat up, writers have taken up the gauntlet on both sides and battle it out on in cyberspace and in print. Notable Hatchette authors (James Patterson, Scott Turow, and Nina Laden. Many Hachette authors and other interested parties from the Big-5 have labeled Amazon a bully. For writers and people with a good command of the English language, it seems they don't understand the definition of bully.

Merriam Webster defines a bully as a blustering browbeating person; especially :  one habitually cruel to others who are weaker; a hired ruffian.

Amazon does not fit the definition. Hachette is one fact of a 200-year-old mega-corporation. That would be the stronger of the two parties. One could say that Amazon has clout when it comes to book distribution, but there are other distributors, like Barnes & Noble.

Independent bookstores are also suitable venues for books, especially of the ink and paper type, and Hachette could continue doing business with those smaller distributors as they have since the Great Depression with the same contract that allows bookstores to return books months, even years after they were shipped. Doing business in the same old manner (fixing prices, 90% returns, and draconian contracts with authors) is what Hachette is doing its best to protect as it take the vanguard in the war between the Big-5 and Amazon.

Amazon does have clout, but Jeff Bezos continues to do business the way successful retailers always do business - by putting the customer first. Some books have been showing up at Amazon stores that formerly had their pre-order buttons removed, but that move was store policy when delivery of an item cannot be guaranteed. Once again, Hachette comes out the bully in that scenario since delaying shipments to force Amazon to knuckle under isn't working quite as well as they had hoped.

The Department of Justice has ordered Amazon and Hachette not to discuss negotiations until an accord has been reached. Amazon has kept mum and, on the surface, so has Hachette, except that no one muzzled the PR department at Hachette which is busily demonizing Amazon in the press and in letters to their authors to force Amazon to heel. Once again, Hachette looks the bully. Remember the definition: blustering, browbeating, habitually cruel to others who are weaker, hired ruffian. There is no doubt the employees in the PR department at Hachette and the Big-5 are earning their salaries with glee and laughing all the way to the bank. Demonizing the opponent is always such fun.

I tell people that when a discussion or debate descends to the point where one of the participants criticizes the opponents, slings mud, and begins calling names, that person is on the ropes and losing. Since I have yet to see anything from Amazon or Jeff Bezos while Hachette supporters and the PR department churns out claims of Amazon bullying the Big-5, I'd say that once again Hachette is doing the bullying.

What people seem to forget (one of the many instances) is that the money to fight and demonize Amazon comes from people buying books written by authors under contract to the Big-5. Authors get a very small piece of the pie unless they are proven international best sellers who have also sold movie rights and whose books are shipped in the millions for readers to buy and download, it would seem far smarter for Hachette and the other members of the Big-5 to pay more money to authors and less to PR departments engaged in mud-slinging. But what do I know? I haven't had a Big-5 publisher pick up any of my novels.

Instead of spouting the party line, it might be in authors' best interests to consider self-publishing or negotiating better contracts with the Big-5 or simply signing up with Amazon to get 70% of the publishing pie and monthly royalty payments where they can track their actual sales instead of being paid twice a year and getting publishing statistics that have been adulterated. After all, isn't 70% of the pie better than 25% for digital and 15% to 20% for print and being paid every month instead of twice a year?

Well, publishers take on more of the risk and can print more books? Publishers have editors and cover artists and all kinds of services that the average author doesn't want to have to deal with? You know what? Those services can be hired out for less than the Hachette and the other Big-5 charge for just being themselves.

PR departments do more than sling mud at Amazon. They also handle marketing and advertising. The funny thing is that the mid-list authors, the publishers' bread and butter writers, get very little of those services. Well, you might say, they don't sell as many books. That's true, but think how many more books those same midlist authors would sell if they got the kind of service that the big names get? And how little a slice of the royalty pie they would continue to get. Marketing and advertising can also be hired out - for less than Hachette and the Big-5 charge as the cost of doing business. Looks like the bully here is pretty obvious. The bully isn't taking lunch money, just the lion's share of the pie and leaving the crumbs to the authors without whom publishers would cease to exist.

Writers have been looking at this publishing thing from the wrong perspective and perspective is everything. It's the difference between seeing your spouse go down on someone else or just picking up the pieces of a broken glass.

All of the services that Hachette or the rest of the Big-5 can be bought for far less than what those same publishers charge and the author retains all the rights. Hachette and the Big-5 have convinced the world (that old PR department working over time again) that they are necessary because they have all the cards, rather like a card sharp stacking the deck when playing a bunch of rubes and marks, and just as lucrative -- for the publishers.

The world is changing, but entrenched publishers aren't changing with it. They spread the word that the end of the book is here and the sky is falling because they're not pulling all the strings while they downsize and use MBAs as editors and continue to suck the marrow out of publishing. What difference does it make if a book sold is digital or print? Digital takes up less space and requires one file sold repeatedly while print books are buried in landfills because bookstores haven't sold them and send them back for a full refund. Where is their ecological conscience? Where is their loving care of the environment as they chop down forests to make books that fall apart in 5 years or less on the shelves or end up in a landfill in New Jersey?

Publishers care about their bottom line, the same bottom line that gives them all the power and the rights while they pay slave wages to authors, negotiating the best deal for themselves and not for the writer. Publishers have no interest in being fair, but they will bully the rest of the world into believing they are the victims here.

They are not victims.

Publishers are parasites that have gotten sleek and fat off the hard work and dreams of others while skimming more of the cream off the top.

Authors need to start caring about the future, not only the future of their bottom line, but the future of books and the world in general. They could revolutionize the business by taking the strings into their own hands and doing business for themselves. Hire out the cover art, editing, marketing, PR and still keep more of the royalties than you're getting with Hachette and the rest of the Big-5 mega-corporation publishers. Sell your books in digital formats and use Print-on-Demand for hard cover and paperback books. Fewer books will be published at the outset, but you won't be stuck with bookstores sending books back for a full refund to be pulped and put into landfills. You can hire a manager or a boutique agency to do the heavy lifting while you write and still get more of the royalties than you are getting now.

Books won't die unless we kill them. Unless we, the writers, stop writing them. Unless we allow Hachette and the rest of the Big-5 bully us into giving up and giving in. The bully wearing the $5000 Italian suit and $6500 Italian shoes with the custom made silk shirts and designer ties and accessories is not on your side while he shares his 3-martini lunches with his confederates. The bully is never on your side.

Can you see who the real bully is now? Bully for you.

Bully when used as an adjective means excellent.

It's Business

I have decided to speak out. No, it's not that strange, except that I haven't commented on the negotiations between Bi publisher, Hatchette Group, and Amazon. I have avoided eye contact just like when I live in a motel and refused to look into any transient patron's eyes lest they consider that a prelude to sex. It saved me many times and it's a real good policy in such situations. It's easier to avoid eye contact than to have to grab, twist, and pull when a casual glance ends up in a disagreement about sex with a man who refuses to take a polite no for an answer.

Amazon and Hatchette are in contract negotiations and heating up. Hatchette wants higher prices in eBooks and Amazon wants to maintain the right to lower prices below $10. This should not come as a surprise to Hatchette, who lost in a similar situation 2 years ago when they and 5 other Big Publishers decided to align with Apple to keep eBook prices high. Amazon won and now the contracts are being renegotiated, except Hatchette wants to keep those prices high and Amazon wants to keep them low.

Hatchette delays shipment of books to Amazon by 2-4 weeks and Amazon responds by removing the preorder button. Like I said, heating up. Hatchette then complains to its authors (getting 25% on eBook sales) and authors like Lilith Saintcrow complains to readers on her blog. (Side note: Lilith, it is fewer books not less books. You had problems with that when I edited your books years ago.) Joe Konrath responds by taking Lilith on point by point. Joe makes a good case and I'd have to agree with the Stockholm Syndrome here -- and with every Hatchette author who feels that Hatchette is being strong-armed by Amazon.

Here's the way retail works. I open a gas station and decide to cut my profit margin temporarily by offering lower prices than all the gas stations around me. More people fill up their vehicles at my gas station, thus saving them money and earning me more money by selling more gas (and sundries while they're waiting to fill up their Hummers, Mercedes, Volvos, Coopers, and Achievas). The other gas stations don't like losing revenue to me so they respond by lowering their prices below mine. I lower mine even further and they lower theirs and -- GAS WAR! Gas wars were big when I first learned to drive. The same goes for bookstores and any retail venue.

Lower prices are used to great effect in a movie, Bare Essence, where Tiger Hayes built a company with the philosophy that it is better to sell a good quality fragrance at a lower price, One bottle at $1000 an ounce is less effective than selling 1000 bottles at $1 an ounce.

On the face of it that seems counter productive to earnings, but it isn't, especially when you consider that 1000 people will tell their friends who will tell their friends and a multimillion dollar empire is built. That is how Jeff Bezos of Amazon took his company from his parents' garage to become the biggest retailer and publisher in the world.  Good business.

Amazon built their company on the promise that they would offer the lowest prices. An eBook that sells for nearly the cost of a hard cover book means only the die hard readers with money to burn will buy -- or will spend their entire budget on an author they love and hope they can find other books at secondhand stores and the library. Amazon continues to want the same thing -- eBooks selling for $9.99 or less. Hatchette wants to keep the prices high. Isn't that how they got in trouble with the Department of Justice (DOJ) in the first place when they banded together with their Big Publisher friends and Apple before and had to settle because they were in the wrong? Methinks Hatchette has learned nothing.

Hatchette has instead gone to their authors, authors like Lilith Saintcrow and James Patterson and Scott Turow (letters on Konrath's blog) to complain and those authors complained (whined) to the public. That is the beauty -- and the curse -- of social media on the World Wide Web.

The whine goes something like this: Amazon won't agree to Hatchette's terms and meany Amazon took off the preorder buttons so Hatchette won't be able to sell as many of my/our books and I lose money and can't feed my kids or pay my mortgage. Boo hoo. Hatchette needs those preorder buttons on Amazon to figure out how many books to print, even though eBooks aren't printed and you're not supposed to notice that.

Guess what, kiddies? Amazon could drop every single Hatchette author from their website and not sell any of their books except through third party buyers and where would that leave you? Amazon is not obligated to sell your books. How does that strike you?

The World Wide Web also keeps these blog posts and inanities forever. Keep that in mind.

Authors seem to forget that the old agency model where bookstores ordered books and didn't pay for them, sending them back to be buried in landfills has been the norm since Big Publishing helped book stores stay afloat during the Great Depression. Millions of books are trashed every year when bookstores send unsold books back to publishers. How much money did the authors make on those books?

Amazon is doing business and Hatchette is protecting its bottom line, the same bottom line that guarantees fancy lunches and travel on expense accounts out of the 75% royalties Big Publishers keep out of eBook sales while the authors are paying their mortgages and feeding their children on the measly 25% they get. Minus expenses, of course.

Amazon sells a lot of books and losing Amazon sales will hurt Big Publishing and eventually authors because authors don't have the guts to ask for higher royalties or take their back list and manuscripts into the indie market and sell their own eBooks for 70% of the profit. Something tells me the Stockholm Syndrome helps to block out those facts. (Remember Patty Hearst?) Or maybe the authors were so busy juggling finances and writing their next books to think that far ahead.

It is busines. It is not personal.  At least not to Amazon which is more than willing to sell Hatchette's books at a lower price. Gram always said some pie is better than no pie.

Hatchette will have to suck it up and sell more books to Barnes & Noble (those that remain) and independent bookstores and print books for libraries at a reduced cost more in line with smaller budgets libraries are working with these days. Good thing it doesn't take much effort to stock eBooks and transmit those to libraries and bookstores. Readers will just have to get used to paying high prices or going to the library more often.

No, Amazon is not the bad guy here. The bad guy is the same bad guy who lost that DOJ case 2 years ago and had to pay off. That would be Hatchette.

Say what you will -- and I am sure you will -- about Amazon's practices, but business is still business. Hatchette needs Amazon more than Amazon needs Hatchette and that is what sticks in Hatchette's craw.

Joe Konrath offers up Scott Turow and James Patterson's comments on this issue and lays them to rest. You wouldn't see any of this if you had to rely on newspapers, TV, and radio for your news. All of this would happen behind closed doors until it was signed, sealed, and delivered. The Internet makes playing tricks and dirty pool so much easier, but it also makes everything so much harder when there are people on the other side offering up common sense and facts instead of emotional appeals.

Lilith Saintcrow said it is up to the reader, and in a limited way that is true. If one of Hatchette's authors' books are not available on Amazon, I can find a bookstore that does carry it somewhere else in a matter of moments. The Internet takes the work and fuss out of checking out dozens of bookstores. And that is the point. Amazon is not the only game in town, but they are the quickest and fastest way to get the books I want, but not at hard cover prices. I will wait until the price drops below $10, even for authors I love and books I've anticipated. I'm 59 and have learned patience. If those other bookstores won't sell me an eBook from a Hatchette writer at a reasonable price, I'll buy a hard cover book from a third party seller or get it at a secondhand or remainder bookstore and the author will get nothing from me. Like I said, it's business.